Do we need split media CDs for F12?

[Matt Domsch]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 09:04:30PM +0000, Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote:
> 
> ----- "Kevin Kofler" <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> > 
> > If Fedora Unity wants to create them, the burden of making them work
> > should
> > be on them.
> > 
> 
> If Fedora Project will not or can not give the community what it
> needs that is where the community steps up, this is exactly what we
> did for Fedora 7.
> 
> There is no requirement that mirror admins have to mirror everything
> that I am aware of, has something changed?

They can omit on a per-directory basis, but not on a per-file basis.
MM tracks whole directories, not each file.  By keeping the DVD and CD
ISOs in the same directory, mirror admins are expected to carry both.

One could argue that MM should be enhanced to track on a per-file
basis.  One could also argue that simply changing the directory
layout, as is proposed for F12 (to also make it match the torrent
layout) would alleviate this.

> If they are not required to mirror everything then why is this even
> an issue? Those that want to mirror the CDs will those that don't
> want to move on with their lives mirroring what they want to or what
> they can which ever applies. Facts are that most mirror admins will
> always want to use less space, less bandwidth this is nothing
> new. How enormous is a debian release on a mirror? Are they
> being... strong armed in to trimming their distro's options? I feel
> Fedora is being manipulated.

The mirror admins themselves are not complaining.  In fact, I haven't
heard a huge uprising from anyone about it.  I merely observed two
things:

1) very few people are using the mirror system to download the CD set.
   Certainly more are using the torrents to get them, but even that
   number is low, and decreasing every release.

2) Several days each week-pre-release is set aside to ensure adequate
   time to get the release to the mirrors.  The bits have to be posted
   by Thursday to ensure they're on sufficient numbers of mirrors by
   Tuesday morning.  45% of the content pushed during this week are
   the CD sets, which by the logs are downloaded by very few people.

I'm not opposed to keeping the CD sets around, and hosting them via
alt.fedoraproject.org or other non-mirror methods.  That would let the
few people who need direct download access to them still get them, and
match service delivery resources to the expected load.

But I also think it's fair to ask the question of do we need them at
all anymore.  I was hopeful that in the time since F7 when this last
came up, the situation had changed.  And I think I've shown that it
has; changed enough to warrant dropping them altogether will be the
subject of this debate.

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux